This call for articles probes the development of mountain nights in their various historical, economic, social, cultural, territorial and environmental dimensions. This inquiry forms part of a chronotopical investigation and rhythmanalysis of societies and territories in which we examine the organization of time along the 24-hour daily cycle, the weekly cycle of seven days and combinations of the two.

The alternation between day and night has long structured life on Earth and determined the ways in which societies, as well as our individual and collective rhythms, function. From the beginning, humans have sought to escape the rhythms imposed by Nature and to extend their empire across the globe. While this conquest of the world system is now more or less complete, night – characterised, like a mountain, by seasonal rhythms and a gradual incline – has long remained a time and space almost untouched by human activity: a downtime, a world unexplored. But times are changing. For ...

]]>François de Grandpréhttp://rga.revues.org/3481
2016-10-06Salience and Blindness: A Haptic Hike on Gins MountainThis paper attempts to follow an improbable ridge line between architecture, geography and linguistics, between the optic and haptic ends of the concept of salience, through a reading of Helen Keller Or Arakawa, Madeline Gins’s 1994 essay-cum-joint-biography partly devoted to “salience” approached through the blind figure of Helen Keller (1880-1968). In a chapter titled “Or Mountains Or Lines”, prominent features envisaged from a sighted perception give way, under the condition of blindness, to saddle-points, swivel-areas and moments of stylistic tentativeness when words and/or syntax begins to fail. Salience, revisited through Keller’s apprehension of mountains as vaporous and mobile masses, leads to tentativeness in writing and to what I here call “failience” in discourse: the failure to stabilise discursive referents, the unsettling reversibility of syntactic lines based, for example, on the swivel-point of an “-ing” form. At work in Gins’s writing is the invention of a cathectic...]]>Marie-Dominique Garnierhttp://rga.revues.org/3453
2016-10-05The Ascent of the Artist in Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952)In his biography Ernest Buckler Remembered, Claude Bissell extensively discusses the importance of Buckler’s first novel entitled The Mountain and the Valley (1952) in contemporary Canadian literature. Even today, the novel stands as an example of modernist literature in the 1950s and is still deeply tied to its author. The Mountain and the Valley owes its success to the various critical responses by scholars who were surprised by a novel which, at first reading, merely aspired to stay true to a pastoral tradition that sought to aestheticize the everyday life of the countryside as opposed to the threatening and alienating life in the city. Born in the Annapolis Valley in the province of Nova Scotia, Ernest Buckler did not define himself as a writer who worked on a farm but as a farmer who wrote. Small town Canada provided the groundwork for his fictional universe known as Entremont and its people whose lives revolve around the passing of the seasons. The novel tells the story of Dav...]]>André Dodemanhttp://rga.revues.org/3416
2016-10-05L’ascension de l’artiste dans The Mountain and the Valley (1952) d’Ernest BucklerAvec son premier roman The Mountain and the Valley (1952), l’écrivain canadien Ernest Buckler s’inscrit dans une longue tradition du Künstlerrroman dont l’une des grandes figures à l’époque des modernistes reste James Joyce et son A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Tout comme Joyce qui remet le genre au goût du jour, Buckler décide d’aborder les affres du jeune artiste et son désir de s’arracher à la tradition et à la vie à la campagne. The Mountain and the Valley décrit le développement intellectuel de David Canaan, un jeune personnage doué d’une sensibilité artistique qui l’isole du reste de sa communauté de la vallée de l’Annapolis, une vallée qui se trouve dans l’arrière-pays de la province canadienne de la Nouvelle Ecosse. L’histoire se déroule dans le village d’Entremont qui, comme son nom l’indique, est cerné par deux montagnes dont les contours enferment et isolent les personnages dans une routine qui résiste au temps et au progrès. Les montagnes au nord et au s...]]>André Dodemanhttp://rga.revues.org/3408
2016-10-05Of Ruskinian Topography: Visible and Legible Salience in Modern PaintersAs contemporary critics have shown, John Ruskin’s lifelong interest in geology not only provided him with a unique understanding of the mountain as a painting subject but also allowed him to develop an idiosyncratic theory of perception where movement and salience prevail – a theory he then applied to his often memorable prose. At first sight, salience is one feature of landscape that one can easily visually apprehend but much less easily account for in prose writing. However, recent research in linguistics may offer a new model for investigations and the means to identify recurrent patterns serving to highlight the transaction from the visual to the verbal and better qualify the writer’s “word painting”. More specifically, Frédéric Landragin’s investigations on the relation between linguistic and visual salience may allow us to explore Ruskin’s prose further and see how the visual salience he noted in painting carries over in his own writing. Applying the salience model to Ruskin’s...]]>Laurence Roussillon-Constantyhttp://rga.revues.org/3407
2016-10-05La topographie selon Ruskin : saillance du visible et du lisible dans Modern PaintersComme l’ont bien montré plusieurs ouvrages critiques récents, l’intérêt que Ruskin a toute sa vie porté à la géologie lui a non seulement permis d’envisager la peinture de la montagne de façon unique mais aussi d’élaborer une théorie de la perception dans laquelle le mouvement et le relief jouent un rôle majeur – théorie qu’il illustra par la suite dans ses propres écrits à travers sa prose poétique.A première vue, le relief est un élément constitutif du paysage facile à saisir visuellement mais difficile à évoquer verbalement. Certaines recherches pionnières récemment menées en linguistique par Frédéric Landragin proposent néanmoins un nouveau dispositif d’analyse nous fournissant le moyen de repérer les modèles récurrents qui régissent le passage du domaine visuel au domaine verbal et sont susceptibles de permettre de mieux cerner le phénomène de « peinture par les mots » (word painting) souvent associé à l’écriture de Ruskin.Par conséquent, il s’agira dans cet article de montrer ...]]>Laurence Roussillon-Constantyhttp://rga.revues.org/3397
2016-10-05